In the 1970s, Burt Reynolds and Mick Jagger were considered to portray
Fletch on the big screen but these suggestions were rejected by
Mcdonald. The author agreed to the casting of Chevy Chase despite
never seeing the comedian in anything. Chase reportedly enjoyed the
role because it allowed him to play several different characters
and work with props. In a 2004 interview with Entertainment Weekly, Chase
confirmed this was his favorite role.

Fletch earned several positive reviews from critics and
performed well at the box office and home video. It has since
developed a cult
following and was followed by a 1989 sequel, Fletch Lives. A
prequel, Fletch
Won, is currently in pre-production.

Contents

Plot

The film opens with one of Fletch's many, often humorous,
monologues. The drug trade is Fletch's latest story, and while
investigating undercover as a beach wanderer one day he is
approached by a well-groomed man, Alan Stanwyk (Tim Matheson).
Stanwyk says he wants Fletch to murder him because he has
inoperable cancer; this way his family will receive his life
insurance. Unaware that Fletch is actually an undercover reporter,
Stanwyk thinks he would be the perfect man for the job, as he
appears to be a person of no consequence who can thus simply
disappear after the shooting without any suspicions being raised.
Fletch agrees to kill Stanwyk when offered a considerable sum of
money, but is suspicious of Stanwyk's motives. Fletch starts to dig
and uncovers a story much greater than his exposé of small-time
drug dealers. As he uncovers the lurid truth about Stanwyk, he also
discovers that a sinister police chief (Joe Don Baker) is behind the drug trafficking on Los Angeles' beaches.

Production

Gregory
Mcdonald's novel was very successful and soon Hollywood came calling. His Fletch
books were optioned around the mid to late 1970s but the author had
the option of approving the actor cast to play Fletch. He rejected
the likes of Burt
Reynolds and Mick
Jagger. When the studio mentioned Chevy Chase as Fletch,
Mcdonald (even though he had never really seen Chase in anything)
agreed.[1]
Years before, Chase's manager recommended Mcdonald's books to him
but he was not interested at the time. When an old friend and
producer Alan Greisman and screenwriter Andrew Bergman got involved, Chase
agreed to do it.[2]
Bergman was hired to adapt Mcdonald's book into screenplay form.
Bergman remembers that he wrote the screenplay "very fast – I
did the first draft in four weeks ... Then there was a certain
amount of improv, and something that we used to call
dial-a-joke".[3]
Mcdonald read the script and was angry by how far it strayed from
his book. He wrote to the studio and listed his many objections to
the screenplay. Director Michael Ritchie invited Mcdonald to the
set of the film and took him out to dinner where, according to
Mcdonald, "Point by point, he showed me where I was wrong. I was
beautifully chewed out".[4]

According to actor Tim Matheson, Fletch was the first
film Chase did after cleaning up his drug problem.[5]
However, the studio hired director Michael Ritchie to keep Chase in
check. During principal photography, Ritchie would do one take
sticking close to the script and then another take allowing Chase
to ad-lib.[5]
Chase enjoyed the role because it allowed him to play a wide
variety of different characters. He said in an interview, "I love
props, like wigs and buck-teeth and glasses. At one point I wear an
Afro and play basketball with Kareem Abdul-Jabbar. There were
some scenes where I didn't recognize myself".[6]

Reception

Fletch was released on May 31, 1985 in 1,225 theaters,
grossing $7 million on its opening weekend. It went on to make
$50.6 million in North America and $9 million in the rest of the
world for a worldwide total of $59.6 million.[7] The
film performed well on home video, earning $24.4 million in
rentals.[8]

Fletch received mixed to positive reviews and has a 73%
rating on Rotten
Tomatoes. Film critic Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half
stars out of four and wrote, "The problem is, Chase's performance
tends to reduce all the scenes to the same level, at least as far
as he is concerned. He projects such an inflexible mask of cool
detachment, of ironic running commentary, that we're prevented from
identifying with him ... Fletch needed an actor more
interested in playing the character than in playing himself".[9]Vincent Canby in
his review for the New York Times
praised Chase's performance, writing, "He manages simultaneously to
act the material with a good deal of nonchalance and to float above
it, as if he wanted us to know that he knows that the whole
enterprise is somewhat less than transcendental".[10]Time
magazine's Richard Schickel wrote, "In
Fletch the quick, smartly paced gags somehow read as signs
of vulnerability. Incidentally, they add greatly to the movie's
suspense. Every minute you expect the hero's loose lip to be turned
into a fat one".[11] In
his review for the Chicago Reader, Dave Kehr wrote,
"Chase and Ritchie make a strong, natural combination: the union of
their two flip, sarcastic personalities produces a fairly
definitive example of the comic style of the 80s, grounded in
detachment, underreaction, and cool contempt for rhetorically
overblown authority figures".[12]

Legacy

Fletch has become a cult film. In an interview for the
New York
Post, Bergman tries to explain its appeal. “It’s so
bizarre, but Fletch strikes a chord. There’s a group of
movies like that in the ‘80s, like Caddyshack, too, that captured a
certain wise-ass thing.”[3]
In particular, the film appeals to college students who have asked
Chase to talk about it at film classes.[3]
The actor has said that the appeal of the character is "the
cheekiness of the guy...everybody at that age would like to be as
quick-witted as Fletch, and as uncaring about what others
think."[3]
Chase has said that this film is his favorite to date because "it
allowed me to be myself. Fletch was the first one with me really
winging it. Even though there was a script, the director allowed me
to just go, and in many ways, I was directing the comedy."[13]
Perhaps the most meaningful praise comes from Mcdonald himself: "I
watched it recently, and I think Chevy and Michael Ritchie
did a good job with it".[1]
The film was voted as the 23rd best film set in Los Angeles in the
last 25 years by a group of Los Angeles Times writers and
editors with two criteria: "The movie had to communicate some
inherent truth about the L.A. experience, and only one film per
director was allowed on the list".[14]

DVD

Fletch was originally released on DVD in 1998, but this
release quickly went out of print. Universal Home Video re-released
a special edition of Fletch - the "Jane Doe" Edition on
May 1, 2007. The film is presented in 1.85:1 anamorphic widescreen,
along with an English Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround track and includes
the retrospective featurettes, "Just Charge It to the Underhills:
Making and Remembering Fletch," "From John Coctoastan To Harry S.
Truman: The Disguises" and "Favorite Fletch Moments". IGN felt that this version was a decent
replacement for anyone who still owned the film on VHS but for "anyone seeking more than that will be
sadly disappointed by the ill-executed extras and slap-dash sound
upgrade".[15]

Additionally, the film was also the next-to-last to be released
by Universal on the HD DVD
format, March 11, 2008 and later released on Blu-ray disc on June
2, 2009.

Sequel and
prequel

A follow-up to Fletch Lives had been discussed in the
90s at Universal Studios. During his
association with Universal after the production of Mallrats (this was
because Gramercy Pictures was co-owned by Universal), Kevin Smith
expressed interest in doing a third "Fletch" film as a sequel
starring Chevy Chase but it never came to fruition. In June 2000,
it was announced that Kevin Smith was set to write and direct a
Fletch film at Miramax Films, after the rights to the
books, which Universal Studios had owned,
reverted.[16]
At the time, Miramax co-head Harvey Weinstein, expressed the hope
that a new Fletch series would be "Miramax Films'
first-ever franchise."

After a disagreement between Chase and Smith in regard to
differing levels of priority for the sequel project, Smith settled
on adapting Fletch Won, which follows Fletch in his early
years as newspaper junior reporter. Smith intended to follow the
novel's plot and characters much more closely than earlier Fletch
films had. Filming the prequel/origin story would have allowed
Smith to make the movie without Chase while still leaving the door
open for him to appear in a cameo role in framing scenes and/or as
narrator. Around this time, Smith mentioned Jason Lee and Ben Affleck as possible choices to play
Fletch.[17]

In August 2003, it was reported that the film was set to start
shooting in January, with Smith still at the helm. Though Smith
insisted on casting Lee in the lead role, Miramax head Harvey
Weinstein refused to take a chance on Lee, citing the general
inability of his films to gross more than $30 million at the box
office. The role of Fletch remained uncast, with Smith considering
a list of actors including Affleck, Brad Pitt, Zach Galifianakis, Will Smith, and Jimmy Fallon.[17]
Though Smith considered compromising and casting Zach Braff in the role,
he eventually left the project in October 2005.

Smith was replaced as writer/director by Scrubs creator Bill Lawrence, in what would
have been his directorial debut. He had enthused, "Not only can I
recite the original Fletch movie line for line, I actually
read all the Greg McDonald books as a kid. Consider me
obsessed — I'm going to try as hard as I can not to screw this
up."[18]
Lawrence was signed to direct both Fletch Won and a
sequel.[18]Scrubs star Zach Braff was rumored to be in talks for the
lead role,[18]
and in January 2007, Braff posted on his web site that "Bill
Lawrence is writing and directing Fletch in the spring and
he wants me to play young Fletch, but no firm plans are in place
yet. He is still writing the script."[19] In
April 2007, Braff announced that he had dropped out of the film to
work on his own film, Open
Hearts.[20]
In June 2007 it was announced that Lawrence was off the project and
had been replaced by Steve
Pink. Joshua
Jackson or Zach Galifianakis is rumoured to be
the new Fletch.